


Unforeseen Personal Attachment

by AshGunnywolf



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Armitage Hux is Clan Techie, Canon Compliant, False Identity, M/M, Matt is a repair technician instead of a radar technician, No beta reader, Past Child Abuse, Scars, Sort Of, Temporary Character Death, These Characters are Villains and Will Not Let You Forget It, as of The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 15:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15174047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshGunnywolf/pseuds/AshGunnywolf
Summary: General Hux has had enough with the Resistance mining data and the investigations returning without arrests. Taking matters into his own hands, he goes undercover as a security programmer named Bill Slee. His initial plan is only to observe and take note of any suspicious behavior so he can get this mess over with as soon as possible, but a repair technician named Matt Arogan might change that.





	Unforeseen Personal Attachment

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic that I have ever finished. There's just something about these two, I suppose.  
> I did not have a beta reader, so if there is any kind of plot hole or missing paragraph, I apologize in advance.  
> If you need to skip the child abuse content, it begins at "Armitage Hux couldn't remember his mother" and ends by "For one work shift the next cycle" The fic should still make sense without it.

The Finalizer was the finest ship in the galaxy, staffed with the best the First Order had to offer. The best engineers designed every aspect of it; it was a weaponized city in space. At every stage of its construction, it was combed for imperfections and made even more perfect. It should have been impervious on all fronts.  
However, someone kept managing to hack into the network and mine data. They usually only ever acquired inconsequential information, thanks to a suggestion that the Order give intimidating names like “Launch Codes” and “Project NeoGenesis” to files on the menial daily schedules of every Stormtrooper. In spite of that, the Order could not risk another breach, not with the latest project still in its embryonic stages.  
General Hux signed off on two separate investigations into the security programming, but they both turned up empty-handed. He supposed that it really was true that if anyone wants anything done, they have to do it themselves.  
He crafted an alias and entered the name, Bill Slee, into the system as a security programmer. He planned out the look he wanted to pursue, something that looked ordinary and natural but didn’t give away who he really was. He told his underlings on the bridge that he would be planet-side and unreachable for an unforeseen amount of time to cover for his absence. He’d practiced a more common accent in private, not wanting to be caught for slipping into his natural Imperial elite accent.  
Once he reached a closet he knew no-one ever used, he put on Force-blocking cuffs and headband first to make certain that no one, not even Ren, could sense his actions. He didn’t want the overgrown child in a cowl meddling in and ruining his plans. The headband slid onto his head, arcing over the top of his head and pressing tight just above his ears, and the cuffs snapped tight onto his wrists with magnetic fasteners. He briefly admired how the twin metallic bands looked.  
He stripped off his uniform piece by piece and pulled on the worker’s uniform, an unflattering grey jumpsuit that fit loosely everywhere, zipping it up in the front. Once he was out of the general’s uniform and dressed in what was essentially a fabric bag, he looked quite a bit smaller and slimmer with none of the layers or stiffness of his greatcoat available to bolster his slight frame. Affecting a slouching, cowering posture changed his silhouette even more so.  
As for his trademark copper hair, he’d already tried every hair color, but none of them looked natural against his skin to him except an even more garish shade of red, lighter and brighter than his own. The wig he chose was just shy of being shoulder-length, scraggly, greasy, and distressed with split ends. Hopefully this would distract from how similar the color was to his own. He slid it on over his own hair and the headband and applied some glue to the hairline to make certain it stuck.  
The final piece to becoming Bill Slee was a pair of augmented sclera contact lenses. He slid the vibrant blue pieces of cybernetic enhancement into his eyes and winced at the surprising thickness of the technology, designed to guide him in his work, implanted into the lenses. He rubbed at his eyes as he studied his reflection in the polished steel wall.  
He looked so...weak. His eyes were already watering from the irritation of the lenses, making him appear on the verge of tears. He practiced a pout and different ways of positioning his hands. He decided that indulging an old habit of rubbing the hems of his sleeves between his fingers looked best for this character, and he went to work.

He checked in with his superior, Driga Madi, a harsh-looking woman with piercing hazel eyes and brown hair cropped close to her head. She looked him up and down like he was something to eat. She grumbled, “Your schedule is on this holopad. I don’t want to see you again,” before handing him a beaten-up secondhand pad and glaring at him until he left.  
His first three-hour shift in the 24-hour cycle was spent in the security monitor room in Block 32-DG, double-checking code for a program that scanned all security camera footage for any movement outside of shift changes and reported deviations from posts. That would no doubt prove to be a waste of his time, as he was alone in the room with four droids that did nothing but execute said program. He would have to find a way into more social situations if this was a reflection of his entire workday.  
In the meantime, he found a bin of copper wire scrap and took to twisting the bits together into shapes to pass the time. He also took the opportunity to practice a more common accent from the Outer Rim than his own High Arkanis accent, which resembled the Coruscanti accent of the Core Worlds and betrayed his more elite upbringing.  
After his first shift came a thirty-minute break for breakfast. He took his meal tray and sat near a large group of others to eat, but he only listened to their idle chatter. It would be unwise to make friends with these working-class people. He had to keep his head clear if he was to succeed. Personal attachment to his lowest employees was out of the question.  
As he ate the dehydrated protein bar and and grimaced at the lack of flavor, a pair of troopers with their helmets off approached him. The first thing he noticed about them was how young they were: probably about eighteen years old, barely even graduates, and already swaggering like captains. He wondered what they did to earn such foolhardy overconfidence.  
“Who’s the new face?” asked one, a brutish-looking man with a square jaw and a bulbous nose.  
The other, who bore a striking resemblance to a rancor with his underbite and small, deep-set eyes, replied, “I dunno, but she’s got a flat ass.”  
Hux rolled his eyes at the misgendering, probably brought on by the hair, and grumbled, “About as flat as your brain wave scans, I’m sure.”  
“Hey,” the brutish one barked, “I don’t like your mouth.” He grabbed Hux by the uniform at the shoulders and lifted him until his toes barely touched the ground.  
He looked down at them with contempt, ready to spit another barb at them, but he quelled his tongue, remembering that he was Bill Slee, an unassuming programmer, someone who would react more meekly to intimidation from troopers full of hot air and blowing off steam. He squirmed in an attempt to escape the trooper’s grasp.  
The brute threw him to the floor, and he scrambled to his feet. He moved to take his tray of food, but the other trooper pushed him back, and he stumbled.  
“Nice eyes, ‘borg.” The human rancor grinned like a nexu and shoved him again. “I think I’ll pull them outta your skull and keep them as a prize.”  
He looked to everyone else in the mess hall, who were all either ignoring the altercation and continuing to eat or watching with an unsettling eagerness like he was an unarmed gladiator thrown to a pack of starving furnocs. He ran out into the hall, panicky and with hands shaking.  
He could hear them behind him, taunting him and threatening him with vile, if not very creative, ways they planned to tear him apart. He did have the advantage of speed, but he was quickly running out of breath, so he turned a corner and leapt into a supply closet, shutting the door behind him and retreating to the back.  
He felt like he was going to be ill. He stood in the corner of the closet, feeling smaller and weaker than anyone else on the ship. His breathing was frantic and shallow, his hands shook with small tremors, and the lenses made his swollen, inflamed eyes burn and ache.  
He knew he didn’t belong there. He was a general. He worked and fought all his life for power and respect. He orchestrated the failures of so many people who stood in his way, including his own father, who met a sticky tailor-made end in a bacta tank. He labored over brilliant ideas that no one else would even dare to suggest. The latest endeavor the Order was undertaking was his creation!  
He earned his title in a way few others had, and yet, it was all taken away with a change in attire and a broad hand raised against him. For all his labors, he could not escape the weak little boy he’d always been.  
The sound of heavy footsteps at the door shook him free of his reverie. When the door opened, he squeezed his eyes shut and punched out, hoping he wasn’t too rusty with his Imperial Combat Exercises.  
His hit struck true, eliciting a grunt like he’d knocked the wind out of his intruder, but it wasn’t the voice of either trooper. It was fuller and deeper, the voice of a grown man rather than a boy with an inflated ego. He looked up and blinked away tears to see a tall, broad man in the orange vest of a repair technician and wire-rimmed spectacles. His curly blond hair stuck up at odd angles, his eyes were a dark hazel, his lips were unusually full, and his aquiline nose jutted out from his face in a way that was not conventionally accepted as attractive but was alluring nonetheless.  
The technician coughed for a bit, recovering from the fist to his gut, so Hux asked, “Are you okay?”  
The technician answered, still coughing between words, “Yeah, you just pack quite the punch. You alright?”  
He responded, “Depends. Are those troopers gone?”  
“Uh, I guess so.” The other man shrugged and looked back over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen any. Why?”  
He pulled his arms in tight to his chest. “They were being assholes.”  
The other man stared at him, undoubtedly taking in his garish hair and thin frame, until he lightly shoved him behind a dormant cleaning droid and hissed, “Be quiet.”  
He watched from behind the droid as the stranger turned to talk to the troopers that were after him. The rancor snarled, “We’re looking for a copper-top bitch.”  
The stranger retorted, “I haven’t seen anyone with red hair.”  
The brute barked, “You sure about that?”  
“No, I think I’d remember. Listen, I have a job to do, could you piss off?”  
The two troopers walked away grumbling under their breath.  
Once they were out of sight, the technician turned back to him   
He sighed. “Thank you.”  
The other man’s eyebrows furrowed. “What?”  
“For...saving me.” He rubbed the hems of his sleeves between his fingers only half-consciously, indulging his old nervous habit. “From those troopers.”  
“Oh.” The other man turned his head away as the tips of his ears turned pink. “I’m just sick of idiots like that throwing their weight around. They need to learn their place.”  
“Yeah.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m Bill. Bill Slee.”  
“I’m Matt. Arogan.”

The next shift was a repeat of the same drudgery of examining code, as were the rest of his shifts, so there wasn’t much to keep him occupied except for twisting more wire scrap together and thinking about the encounter at breakfast.  
He couldn’t believe the audacity of those two troopers. His programming was meant to be flawless, and if there were any iniquities or discrepancies that survived past conditioning into deployment, then the other troopers were supposed to report it. How were these two troopers able to be so freely vile and abrasive? Their ego and readiness to harm an employee of the First Order was deeply upsetting. He would have to find their ID numbers and refer them to reconditioning, possibly even execute them and refer their entire squadron to reconditioning for failure to report the deviant behavior.  
As he recounted the events, he kept dwelling on the technician. Matt was not an unattractive man, even if most would consider his atypical appearance to be ugly. He was kind where everyone else stood by and let the assault happen.

Three cycles later, he spotted Matt on a security feed getting berated by a woman he assumed was Matt’s superior. He was on his knees with both arms inside the wall, presumably working with some wires.  
Hux wasn’t sure what possessed him to listen in on the conversation, but he switched on the audio anyway. Immediately, a stream of barked orders came to life in his headphones. “Matt, you idiot! Have you ever done this before?”  
Matt winced and grumbled, “Can you not yell at me?”  
His superior smacked the back of his head. “I’ll stop yelling when you start getting things right!” She leaned in close and hissed, “I’m leaving. This had better be done correctly by the time I get back here.”  
He watched as she walked away. The hallway was empty then.  
He searched on his datapad for Matt’s comm number and punched it in to his own comm.  
Matt picked up and responded, “Who is this?”  
“It’s Bill. The techie from yesterday. Can you tell me about what’s going on in the wall there?”  
“How do you know what I’m doing?”  
“I’m on security monitor duty right now. Listen, I want to help you.”  
“I don’t need your help!”  
He recoiled upon being shouted at. “Sorry, I just thought you were having trouble.”  
Matt hesitated. “No, I’m sorry. Um, some stuff came loose in the vents and got these wires messed up. They were all frayed, and a couple were broken entirely. I’ve already soldered them back together.”  
“Okay. Do you know how heat-shrink tubing works?”  
Matt sighed. “Not really. I mean, I know how it works, but this is a brand I’m not familiar with. I’ve already melted the insulation off one wire trying to get it to work.” Hux heard the latent anger in Matt’s voice.  
“Uh huh. You’re gonna want to use the lowest setting on your heater. If that doesn’t work, slowly crank it up. Don’t get impatient and heat it up too quickly.”  
He watched the screen as Matt followed his instructions. Matt smiled once he finished and messaged him, “You’re a big help, Techie.”  
“Techie?”  
“Oh.” Matt’s words grew anxious. “Do you not like that?”  
“No, no, it’s fine. It just surprised me.”  
“Okay. Well, thanks, Techie.”  
“You’re welcome.”  
The comm conversation ended, and he watched as Matt’s superior returned and nodded her approval before leaving again. Matt gave a thumbs-up to the security camera, and it made Hux smile.  
Later that day as he mulled over what happened, he couldn’t quite explain why he did it. Perhaps he was simply returning the favor, but no, that wasn’t it. He felt no obligation to help Matt outside of the fact that seeing Matt upset made him upset.

They started sitting together at dinner break with some of the other workers who took their break at that hour.  
“So I heard from one of the Stormtroopers that Kylo Ren has an eight-pack,” Matt nonchalantly stated between bites of protein bar. “That Kylo Ren is shredded.”  
It was a bit obnoxious that the Knight had fanboys in the working class, but somehow, it was endearing when Matt’s train of thought would drift to wondering what Kylo Ren was like in person. It didn’t even seem like a sexual fascination, Matt just thought he was cool.  
A trooper rolled his eyes. “Please. He wears all that kriffin’ clothing to hide that he weighs ninety pounds soaking wet.”  
He saw Matt clench his fists under the table, and something possessed him to put his own hand onto Matt’s, sapping the tension from the technician’s frame.  
“I’ve heard he never takes his helmet off,” he interjected. “What do you think he looks like?”  
Matt shrugged. “I dunno.”  
He actually had seen some of Kylo Ren before, but they didn’t need to know that. When going to report to the Supreme Leader, he had seen the back of the Knight’s head before he put his helmet back on. His hair was black and quite thick, cascading from his head in loose curls. If the rest of his face was as soft-looking as his locks, then it was no wonder he wore a helmet to hide his appearance. A baby-faced Kylo Ren would only ever be seen as childish when he threw his legendary tantrums. No matter how powerful, it is difficult to fear a soft face.  
“Well,” an eavesdropping accountant named Plink interjected, “I think he has lots of facial scars. You know how he killed all of those Jedi students? He probably hated them so much because they carved up his face with a lightsaber or something.”  
“That makes sense,” a trooper agreed. “If he grew up in an environment like that, where he was abused for not following Jedi doctrine, then that would explain why he’s...like that.”  
This suggestion garnered a few nods from others. Soon, everyone was adding their own opinions on what kind of horrible things happened to him to make him so angry and so loath to show his face.  
Everyone, that is, except for Matt, who rolled his eyes, balled his fists, and disengaged from the conversation, and Hux.  
He knew they probably didn’t actually have anything against the abused or the scarred. There were always workers and troopers being sent to reconditioning, and they sometimes returned in rough states, faint bruises on their necks and wrists and trembling fingers and quaking voices, both of which faded with time. No one held it against them as far as he knew.  
All the same, it still stung after all this time to hear it so casually and flagrantly. Even if it wasn’t directed at him, he still felt singled out, still heard the voices of his classmates at the Academy, his doctors, and his father.

Armitage Hux couldn’t remember his mother beyond a warm smile and gentle fingers running through his hair. He assumed he inherited his frame and lips from her: his father was a much wider man than he, with thick fingers and lips that were quite thin.  
He’d lived with his father as long as he could remember. When the old men and women of the fallen Empire fled to the far-flung Unknown Regions to regroup and lick their wounds, he was taken from his mother’s arms on Arkanis. It was just as well for him, she probably died on that disgusting planet, and he would have died with her if he’d stayed. He’d visited once he graduated from the Academy, and he was glad to have so few childhood memories of the mildewy place.  
The first time he could remember taking a belt to the back was when he spilled his juice on the floor. It was no trouble at all for the cleaning droid to take care of, but Brendol Hux would not tolerate such messiness in his home. He removed his belt, a thick leather one with a silvery buckle, bent five-year-old Armitage over his knee, and gave him three quick, hard lashes in the small of his back. Brendol Hux stormed off after he was done, leaving the nanny droid to patch him up with bacta.  
As the years passed and he became too tall to lay across his father’s lap, Armitage was made to brace himself with his hands on the wall and his feet planted at shoulders’ width. Brendol Hux started taking to lecturing him between lashes, using biting words like You idiot boy, I accept nothing less than perfection in the classroom from you, Your marks in physical education have been abysmal, No son of mine is so weak and pathetic, You are my flesh and blood and you will behave as such.  
He learned quickly to stop crying when being punished.  
Against his better judgment, he tried one of his father’s cigarras behind his back when he was ten years old. He thought the look of a cigarette in one’s fingers was distinguished, and he wanted to practice breathing the tabac smoke. It made his throat and lungs burn like nothing he’d ever experienced before, and he nearly threw up. He never touched one again, and when he was caught throwing out a barely-consumed cigarra, Brendol Hux decided it would be best to teach him a lesson by extinguishing the still-burning embers of the cigarra on his shoulder.  
That was when he graduated from belts to burns. They were easier to hide than the wide berths of cracked, weeping skin on his back, but they hurt longer, and the scars were thicker. He was more careful at this age, though, so he got into less trouble, and what trouble he did get into, he usually found a way to escape before Brendol Hux caught wind of it.  
There had been a few times when he’d made his father angry enough to lose his calculated veneer of detachment and abandon the ruse that he was only trying to make his son better. That was when Armitage would find himself in the infirmary with black eyes and bruised ribs, and he would recite what his father told him to say, I got in a fight with one of the other boys. No, I don’t know his name.  
The words Brendol Hux used then were uglier, more accurate to how his father actually saw him. He never used sentences when he was this infuriated, only names. Names like bastard, mistake, embarrassment, garbage, useless.  
When he was put into the Academy full time as a cadet, his father was careful not to even look at him. This was a welcome change of pace, even if some boys pushed him around, claiming that he was only accepted out of nepotism, that the Grand Admiral and the Commandant put him where he was. As long as Commandant Brendol Hux was far away from him and he could excel in his work without fear of any physical repercussions in the case of failure, he didn’t mind the occasional accusation of favoritism. Let the lesser cadets believe what they liked.  
In his dormitory, he took special care to keep himself covered when he got in and out of the refresher. Then his roommate, Garren Fray, grabbed his towel and pulled it off him, and his striped back and spotty shoulders were put on display in the public shower. He’d worked so hard to hide his scars from everyone except his doctor, and then everyone in Dormitory Hall 3A knew what kind of disappointment he was.  
Some of the boys of Dormitory Hall 3A dogged him with questions about where the scars came from, morbid curiosity and a touch of rabid hunger in their eyes, eager to learn what force could leave a mark on the cadet with the best marks in their year. Other boys mocked him, choosing instead to tease him for the lower-hanging fruit of his appearance, calling him imbecilic names like “Skinny-Dick” and “Bitch-Hips” and “Bones.”  
A couple of the boys pitied him with their eyes, not saying a single word to him, sometimes giving him soft pats on the shoulder. Those boys were the worst of them all because he knew what their families were like: drunken fathers and bruised mothers and little boys caught in the crossfire. How dare they assume they knew him, knew his childhood? They saw a scrawny and pale torso marked up with scar tissue, and they thought he was some kind of kindred spirit? He wasn’t like them at all.  
After he was transferred to another dormitory for cadets of a higher rank and then the boys of Dormitory Hall 3A were all sent on a field mission where their shuttle engine malfunctioned and exploded, everyone commended him for being so emotionally stalwart after losing so many “friends” in such a tragic accident. He accepted the praise with grace.

For one work shift the next cycle, Matt was there fixing one of the security monitor droids that had begun to malfunction. They worked in comfortable silence until Matt asked, “Techie, why did you get so upset when Plink suggested that Kylo Ren has abuse scars on his face?” He hesitated, furrowing his brow a bit. He made like he wanted to add something to the question, but decided against it.  
Hux remembered the scene at lunch break. “It’s nothing.”  
Matt reached over to pat his shoulder, a bit awkwardly, and reassured him, “It’s alright if you don’t want to tell me.”  
He slouched and pulled his arms in even tighter, rubbing at the hems of his sleeves. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to let him in on his secret. The technician wouldn’t technically even know it was Hux’s secret. “I have scars. Not small ones like you would get in reconditioning.”  
Matt stiffened. “You do?” This was clearly unfamiliar territory to him.  
“I’m pretty careful to make sure no one sees them.” He loosened the collar of his jumpsuit and showed off his shoulders, littered with cigarra burns. “There are whipping marks on my back and more of these on my arms.”  
Matt gritted his teeth. “Who gave those to you?”  
He could see the anger behind Matt’s eyes, and it touched him. No one had ever cared for him like that before except for Rae Sloane, the woman who took him under her wing and gave him experience the likes of which he’d never dreamed he’d have.  
He didn’t want his story to become too accurate to his own life, so he said, “Before I came to the First Order, I was enslaved on…” he combed his brain for names of recently conquered planets, but he blanked, “...I don’t know the planet’s name in Basic. But I was security detail for a gang. I would sometimes fall asleep in front of the monitor, and when I was caught…”  
He picked at his cuticles and hung his head, letting Matt fill in the blanks.  
The silence weighed on his shoulders until Matt asked, “Is that why your eyes are like that?”  
“Hmm?” He remembered his lenses, and decided to tie them into Bill Slee’s little sob story. “Yeah, these are cybernetic. I lost my real eyes...when my slaver decided I would work better with implants.”  
Silence, not as heavy this time, filled the air again. Hux felt inexplicably better than he had in years. It wasn’t any kind of pleasure, not like when he’d delivered the speech that announced the death of his father or when he’d been promoted to the level of having direct ties with the Supreme Leadership. It was peace, as if he’d shrugged off a weight he didn’t even know he’d been carrying all his life.  
Matt spotted the little copper menagerie of trees and animals and smiled. “Those look so real.”  
“You really think so?” He supposed all the practice he got during boring shifts made him fairly adept at twisting the wire into recognizable figures, but he wasn’t expecting them to garner any compliments.  
“Yeah! You should become an artist when you retire.” Matt beamed, his slightly crooked teeth showing and his whole face shining with adoration.  
He felt his face grow hot. “Thank you.”  
Matt’s comm blinked, letting him know he had another job waiting for him elsewhere. “I should go. See you later, Techie.”  
You should become an artist when you retire. That was an interesting thought. Truth be told, he never gave much thought to his future after the First Order won the war, being far too busy with the present state of things. He was destined to take the throne after Snoke passed, but he had no idea what times of peace meant for a military leader. He loathed the thought of becoming like his father, growing fat and lazy, complacent with his own decline.  
The more he thought about it, the more he realized he had no clue what the future held for him. Against his better judgment, the imagined scenarios that made him happiest, whether he succeeded and became Emperor or failed and was exiled to some unnamed planet, had Matt in them. He could not put his finger on why, exactly. The man simply made him happy. There was something about his unguarded mannerisms, his honesty. He made Hux feel things that he could not describe. Every time they met, it was like seeing Matt’s face for the first time. Every day was another chance to relearn the curve of his lips, the deep amber brown of his eyes, the sharp features softened by an occasional smile that was brighter than any star.

He couldn’t bear it anymore. He had to do something about Matt. He couldn’t stay in the bowels of the Finalizer forever with this repair technician, even if he was so much more than a mere technician.  
Matt didn’t really love him anyway, Hux told himself, he cared for the weak, pitiful ex-slave that was Bill Slee. Matt deserved better, he deserved to find a nice woman who knew what love was, he deserved so much more than a man who knew nothing of sacrifice or compassion.  
Late into a shift most used to sleep, he took Matt’s hand and pulled him into an empty server room. In the dim lighting accented by the blinking red, blue, and green bulbs on the servers, Matt blinked until his eyes adjusted. He looked to Hux and gasped. “Techie, your eyes…”  
“What about them?”  
“They’re glowing.” Matt grinned, and the sudden show of unbridled adoration made Hux’s face grow warm with blush. “They’re beautiful.”  
Matt paused before asking, “What color were they? Your natural eyes…”  
Hux brushed a strand of hair behind his ear. “They were blue. Not as bright. More like…” He trailed off, looking away.  
He felt large but gentle hands at his own hands. “What did you bring me in here for?”  
“Oh, um…” He balled his fists. “I wanted to tell you something.”  
Matt froze, his eyes quickly growing panicky. “I was afraid of that.”  
“Of what?”  
“You’re in love with me.”  
“Excuse me?” Hux’s mind whirled out of control. He wasn’t in love. He certainly was fond of Matt, but love? He’d never loved anyone before, he hardly even had friends. But then, nothing he’d ever felt before compared to the affection that poured out whenever he laid eyes on the gentle giant before him...  
“I was hoping-” Matt bit his lower lip, clearly uncomfortable, “I mean, I like you. A lot, but…”  
“But what?” Hux extended a hand to touch Matt’s shoulder, but Matt wrapped his hand around Hux’s tiny wrist, stopping him from touching. The vice-like grip startled him, and he tried in vain to pull out of Matt’s hand as his mind filled with memories of broken bones.  
Matt’s eyes shimmered with regret as he released Hux’s wrist. “We should stop spending so much time together.”  
That struck a nerve. “What?!”  
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let anything get in the way of my job.”  
“What are you talking about?” Hux balled his fists. “You’re a repair technician! You’re not exactly a general!”  
Matt reached to run his fingers through his hair but decided against it, his hand hovering over his head before returning to his side. “You wouldn’t understand, Techie.”  
“No, I think I understand perfectly!” He was shaking with rage now. “You don’t know how to handle someone actually caring about you for once in your miserable life!”  
He stormed out of the server room, his eyes aching more than ever.

Matt was gone the next cycle.  
He didn’t show up to his first shift, he didn’t appear at meal breaks, he simply disappeared. Upon investigating, Hux found that he wasn’t even in his chambers when the cycle-change alarm went off.  
He told himself it was for the best. The weight of a personal attachment to one of the working class was only slowing down his investigation. He didn’t need anything in his life as petty as a friend, or stars forbid, a boyfriend.  
If he cried alone in the server room when no one was looking for him, that was his business.

He found the hacker not long after Matt vanished. It was actually a team effort: one of the other programmers, a weaselly thing named Keeto Rigg, was working in tandem with Stormtrooper DR-6249. She would write loopholes into the firewall code and pass them off to DR-6249, who would then send them to the Resistance.  
He had them sent to be interrogated while he dressed himself and shed the trappings of Bill Slee. Once the investigations officer finished his questioning, he entered the room with his greatcoat flaring behind him and snapped, “At last I have found the embarrassments that have been baring their arses to the Resistance.”  
The trooper was shaking in his boots, on the verge of tears. Rigg sat tall next to him, staring daggers at Hux.  
“I do have to commend you both. Your work is exceptional, Rigg, and you both managed to evade the attention of the Order for this long.” He sneered, his frigid distaste for them warping his kind words and making them shiver.  
“Please don’t send us to reconditioning, General, sir,” the trooper moaned between shallow breaths. Rigg glared at him.  
Hux let his eyes soften. “Who said anything about reconditioning?”  
Before either could respond, he fired his blaster twice, each shot landing cleanly between its target’s eyes.  
He left the interrogation room and addressed the guard posted at the door, “Clean up the mess. I want both their personal belongings and workspaces swept for anything out of the ordinary.”  
He had the two troopers that threatened him, CL-3521 and CL-4652, executed as well. He wasn’t there to watch, but it felt good in a petty, self-indulgent way to know their lifeless bodies would join those of the traitors to be incinerated and their ashes would be repurposed in some form of compressed carbon. Even traitors will serve the glory of the First Order among the rest of the recycled refuse as a fork or the sole of a shoe.

For the first time in months, he slept in his own bed. He ate breakfast that was prepared by a chef instead of a dehydration machine. He wore his familiar greatcoat. The trappings of a general were infinitely preferable to the bare minimum granted to him when he was Bill Slee.  
However, as much as he relished living in the upper echelons of the Finalizer, he couldn’t shake the feeling of loss. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t miss his friend, that he was better off free from attachments to his underlings.  
As he returned to the bridge for the first time since his leave of absence began, Lieutenant Mitaka greeted him, “Welcome back, General.”  
He nodded at the lieutenant, who returned to work once acknowledged. He appreciated the spirit and dedication Mitaka exuded, and he was incredibly grateful for another officer on the bridge who was too young to remember the Empire. He was not fond of the older brass who only earned their positions by simply graduating up the ladder as their age dictated, and he knew they despised his relative youth in return.  
He presided over the bridge in silence for a few minutes before the doors opened and Kylo Ren entered. He briefly recalled the conversation about what sort of face hid behind that mask as he looked over the familiar hulking figure, but he dismissed it from his mind as the Knight approached him.  
“I see you’ve returned from whatever waste of time you’ve been up to for the past few months,” the vocoder in Ren’s helmet broadcasted.  
Hux began mentally reciting mathematical formulas to keep Ren from skimming through his thoughts to find the truth. “It was highly classified, Ren, so don’t even ask.”  
Ren loomed over him, making the most of their difference in height. His intimidation tactics might have worked on a lesser person, but Hux was never cowed by such behavior, especially not when he knew that the Supreme Leader himself ordered the Knight not to harm him. He looked up at the blank helmet and scowled.  
When Ren decided he wasn’t going to get the information he wanted, he turned on his heel, cape dramatically billowing behind him, and left the bridge.  
Hux was about to return to work when he heard a clatter of metal against the polished tile floor and looked to the source of the noise. In the Knight’s wake, there laid a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He knelt to pick them up and inspect them.  
Oh stars.  
They were Matt’s spectacles. It was unmistakable. Wire frames like these were obsolete, no one else on the ship could have possibly worn them.  
“Captain Canady, you have the bridge,” he barked as he fled, trying his hardest to retain composure until he reached his private chambers.  
Once he was certain he couldn’t be heard, he screamed.  
That was why Matt disappeared so suddenly. Kylo Ren killed him. He found out what Hux was doing, overcoming all of Hux’s careful planning and foresight, and murdered Matt for fun. Then he deliberately dropped the spectacles on the bridge where he knew Hux would find them.  
How could Ren do this? Did he really hate Hux so much that he would murder an innocent man to provoke him? Was being loved by him such a crime?  
“...Did I love Matt?” he whispered, as if afraid someone would hear.  
He realized that he did.  
How awful that he could only admit to himself that he loved someone after learning they were dead. He supposed he wasn’t such a heartless machine after all.  
“I...loved him.” he said aloud. It frightened him to hear his voice say something so vulnerable, so emotional, and it only made him feel worse. He loved Matt, and now Matt was dead. Because of him.  
He wiped away tears he was barely aware he’d shed and placed the spectacles in a pocket inside his greatcoat. He would never forgive Kylo Ren for this.

Hux came into the projection hall to speak with the Supreme Leader and saw Kylo Ren was already there. He turned his head to see who was entering, and Hux found himself somewhat taken aback by the lack of a helmet.  
This was the first time he’d ever seen the Knight’s face up close. He remembered the man’s hair well enough to recognize that it was him. He couldn’t quite understand why the hawkish nose, the puffy lips, and the rich voice were so hauntingly familiar to him, but then he recalled overhearing Leader Snoke say something about how the famous rebels General Organa and Han Solo were his parents. Perhaps that was it: he was seeing the family resemblance.  
He hoped his surprise didn’t show. It would be unwise to show weakness in the company of these men.

He led his squad of troopers through the forest, searching for the Knight and hoping that the foolish man was not still preoccupied with battling rebels. He may have been trained for it in the Academy, but he despised direct conflict, especially the barbaric showmanship in which Ren was schooled.  
His stomach lurched and his chest ached with fire with every tremor beneath his feet. The planet was falling apart, and he needed to find Ren and get out of the atmosphere before they both died. He had feared this outcome, but he’d reassured himself every step of the way that the protections around the vent were impenetrable, that this base would not go the way of the Death Stars. He had finally put his worries to rest when he first saw the sky turn scarlet with the energy that would destroy the Hosnian system. He felt perfectly idiotic now.  
He eventually found the man lying unconscious in the snow with a horrible gash on his face and chest and a hole blown in his abdomen. The snow was slowly turning a rusty brown around him as he bled. And yet, even as he looked so disheveled and beaten, he looked so...peaceful.  
Hux briefly entertained the idea of killing him where he lay before dismissing it. Supreme Leader Snoke would know the truth, would pull it from his mind. He couldn’t kill Snoke’s favorite pet, not before Snoke himself passed. No, Hux would do his duty.  
When they were safely boarded on a transport shuttle leaving the planet’s orbit, he looked out the transparisteel window at the destruction they were leaving behind. The hollowed-out base was crumbling. The atmosphere had caught fire. All his hard work was dashed. His meticulous planning, his secrets, his overwhelming pride at finally seeing this impossible feat of engineering come to life and fire its first shot at the Hosnian system, it was all gone. He failed.  
When Ren finally returned to consciousness, he did his fair share of sulking as well. An untrained scavenger and a traitorous Stormtrooper beating him and leaving him for dead was an acceptable reason to be pouty in private, Hux supposed, so he didn’t say anything.

“Excellent, I’ll take it in my chambers.”  
He moved to leave the bridge but was cut off by the hologram of Leader Snoke flickering to life before him. Snoke’s grandiosity required that the projection of his head alone be twice as tall as any human. It was almost laughable to witness such an inflated ego, but he wasn’t about to make any insurrectionist remarks about the Supreme Leader.  
“Ah, good.” He braced himself for the oncoming verbal deluge of belittling and lecturing. “Supreme Lead-”  
Snoke knocked his legs out from under him. When his chest hit the floor, knocking the breath from his lungs, he slid across the bridge. When he skidded to a stop, he could barely make himself open his eyes. He knew when he looked up, he would see the uncaring faces of his subordinates looking on as he suffered.  
Memories rushed through his head of taking lashes from his father’s belt, of quivering alone in his bedroom the first time his father broke his arm, of fellow Academy cadets pushing him down flights of stairs, of hiding in a supply closet. He felt like a fool, deliberately humiliated before his entire crew by a leader he’d believed to be above physical punishments.  
He forced himself to his knees, looking up at the bloated, washed-out projection of his Supreme Leader. His ears rang, so he could only guess at the exact words, but he knew the sentiment well: You are weak, unfit of your position. You are useless to me.  
When he nursed his wounds and wiped the blood from his split lip in private, he found his ribs were bruised under his uniform. He had his personal medical droid scan for any fractures, just to be certain, but he could already tell that nothing was broken. He knew the feeling too well.

He stood over Kylo Ren’s body, the only figure left in the room not horribly dismembered.  
He could do it now. With the Knight unconscious, he could finally take matters into his own hands. He could have everything he ever wanted with one pull of a trigger. With Ren dead, he could take the throne with no contest. He could bring order to the entire galaxy. He could…  
He could finally exact revenge in Matt Arogan’s name.  
He reached for his blaster but was interrupted by Ren’s return to consciousness. Damn. His hand returned to his side as the Knight stumbled to his feet.  
“What happened?”  
“The girl murdered Snoke.” Ren refused to face him, so he was unsure of the meaning of the Knight’s tone.  
Hux took this story with suspicion. Unless the old Jedi, Skywalker, was one hell of a teacher, he highly doubted that the scavenger suddenly grew enough in her abilities to leave behind this much destruction alone.  
“She took Snoke’s escape craft.”  
“We know where she’s going. Get all our forces to that Resistance base. Let’s finish this.”  
With that direct order from Ren’s lips, the true horror of this farcical scenario Hux had stumbled upon dawned on him. Ren had killed Snoke and the Praetorian Guards. Maybe the girl had bested him and escaped without his help, but she couldn’t have possibly taken on everyone in the room alone and made it out alive. Ren was responsible for the new vacuum of power at the top of the Order. Someone would have to take command, and it wasn’t going to be Hux.  
“Finish this?” He scowled, swallowing his panic as his brain bombarded him with thoughts of what Ren could do to him now that Snoke was no longer alive to hold the Knight back from tearing him apart. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”  
“You presume to command my army?” He was shaking with fear, but he shouted on. He’d never backed down before, and he certainly wouldn’t now. All he had in this battle was words, and damn if he wouldn’t use them. “Our Supreme Leader is dead! We have no rul-”  
His throat closed, cutting off his air. His stiff posture crumpled like thin plasteel in a vacuum. His hands instinctively went to his neck to pull at the hand strangling him, but there was nothing there. He felt his eyes brimming with tears, and his vision grew spotty, barely able to see the Knight reaching out with the Force.  
“The Supreme Leader,” Ren said with a snarl and a harsh iciness to his voice that chilled Hux to the bone, “is dead.”  
His senses fading, Hux gurgled through his crushed windpipe, “Long live the Supreme Leader.”

Years passed, and the meager remains of the Resistance only grew. The First Order took far too many hits to maintain their size and strength. Even now, the last ship of their fleet was being boarded by the Resistance and their Republic allies. Hux was fleeing to the hangar when he ran into Ren, also running.  
Ren grabbed his arm roughly and pulled him down the hall to his own private hangar.  
“Where are you taking me?” he snarled. “Release me at once!”  
“The main hangar has been overtaken. You’re coming with me.”  
Again with the frigid deadpan that hid a petulant child’s mentality. It never ceased to frighten him how quickly Kylo Ren could swing between raging and unsettlingly calm. He was not going to die in the grasp of a supposed ally, not at this moment, so he went along with Ren, whose intuition was often correct.

He sat in the copilot’s seat of the unmarked escape craft, silently fuming. He hoped Ren could hear every single expletive, curse, and slur that ran through his head.  
This moment reminded him the loss of Starkiller Base. Though this time he was hurtling through hyperspace and unable to see the destruction he was leaving behind, he was still with Ren on a small ship, running from their failure as countless workers and officers died.  
“How could this have happened?” he snarled. He knew why: the Knight’s posturing as Supreme Leader was to blame for everything. He couldn’t act logically, he always made decisions based on how he was feeling. His emotional rendezvous with his father on Starkiller had allowed the Resistance to plant explosives right under his nose, his rage-filled confrontation with his old Jedi teacher gave the Resistance ample time to escape, and now his flagrant immaturity cost them the entire First Order.  
“Perhaps you should have had more control of your emotions,” Ren punctuated his acidic words with a sneer, “General.”  
Hux stiffened. Even now, the fool was pushing his buttons. “Excuse me?”  
“Your spite was a key player in the fall of the First Order.”  
“You keep your damned mouth shut, Ren,” he hissed, his words dripping with poison. “I have been more forgiving than you will ever deserve. You have physically abused me, undermined my authority at every turn, and taken the one thing I loved from me.”  
Ren scoffed. “I know you wanted to be Supreme Leader, but love?”  
“Don’t play the fool!” He felt his voice rising, growing to a scream, but he didn’t care. It didn’t matter if Ren killed him now. “I know it was you. You found the one person who ever cared for me, and you killed him!”  
The Knight looked truly bewildered at that. “What are you talking about?”  
Hux huffed. “I forgot. The great and powerful Kylo Ren kills so many people without caring, without even batting an eye.” His hand drifted under his coat to feel the spectacles in his pocket. “I’m certain the name Matt Arogan means nothing to you, but it meant the world to me.”  
“Matt Arogan?” Ren paused.  
“Just leave me alone.” He scoffed. “If you’re not going to kill me, then let me rest. I’ve had a very long day.”

For the first time in what felt like hours, Hux spoke again, voice rough from nearly shouting himself hoarse, “Did you know he looked up to you?”  
Met with silence, he continued, “He could hardly go an entire day without saying something about how he heard you had an eight-pack or how cool he thought your lightsaber was.  
Was he awestruck when he saw you?”  
He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around his legs. “I’d do anything to see him again.”  
“Who was he to you?”  
He looked to Ren. “What?”  
“Matt Arogan. How did you know him?”  
“As if you don’t already know! I was so careful to make certain you wouldn’t know what I was doing. I wore Force-blocking technology, for krif’s sake!”  
“...Techie? My Techie?”  
Hux froze. “Don’t call me that. That was his name for- Not for me. For Bill.”  
Ren shook his head, making his jet black locks bounce around. “You don’t get it. I didn’t understand either, but now I do. I can’t believe I was so blind.”  
“What are you talking about?”  
“I was looking for suspicious activity, Snoke could sense that something was amiss among the workers, he ordered me to leave once he sensed you were making me weak, I never expected-”  
“Tell me in plain speech what the hell you’re talking about!”  
“I was Matt Arogan.”  
Hux couldn’t help but gasp as all the pieces fit together in his mind. That was why Matt was so self-righteous when he broke things off, that was why Kylo Ren looked so familiar when he first saw the man’s face, that was why Kylo Ren was carrying around Matt’s glasses. Matt Arogan was Kylo Ren all along.  
It infuriated him.  
“So what?” he spat, his hands balling into fists at his sides. “You think I’m going to fall for you all over again? Just because it was you all along?”  
“Wha-” Ren clearly didn’t expect that. He sputtered, grasping for words, “Fall for me? I don’t-”  
Hux interrupted him, “You tried to kill me. Or did you forget? I swore I’d never forgive you, and that hasn’t changed.”  
“Please,” Ren begged, his face uncharacteristically painted with pain and sorrow. His deep amber eyes brimmed with tears. “Please, I didn’t know… I was afraid you would kill me if, if I didn’t…”  
“If you didn’t choke me and make me fear for my life.” He left out the part where the Supreme Leader avoided him unless absolutely necessary after that day. “Now stop groveling, it doesn’t suit you.”  
The Knight took a deep breath. “May I kiss you?”  
“Excuse me?”  
“Just to see if we really feel nothing for each other anymore.” Ren reached across the cockpit to place his large hand on top of Hux’s. “You say you loved Matt, and I did love Techie. I want to see if there’s any love left in us.”  
Hux snapped, “If it’ll make you shut up about this nonsense and put an end to your fantasies that I could ever feel anything other than hatred for you, then let’s get it over with.”  
They both leaned forward, closed their eyes, and gently pressed their lips together.  
Hux mused that this wasn’t so terrible. Kylo’s lips were rather soft, and he wasn’t tearing his face apart like one would expect from a kiss from Kylo Ren.  
He was about to pull away and insist, in spite of his slightly softened heart, that he did not forgive Ren, he did not care if Ren was Matt or Matt was Ren or however they were addressing this, and he most certainly did not love Kylo Ren, when-  
“My Techie.”  
With those words, whispered from Kylo’s lips onto his own, awoke something in him. All the memories came rushing back to him, the first time they met in that closet, when Matt gave him the nickname Techie, when he complimented the little wire figurines, everything. He loved Matt Arogan with all his heart, and it melted his frigid nature even after all this time.  
“Stars, it’s really you.” He could feel his face flushing red, but it didn’t matter. “You’re alive. I thought you were dead.”  
Kylo laughed, not out of spite, but for joy. “Does this mean you forgive me after all?”  
“I… I don’t know.” Hux brushed a loose strand of hair back into place. “I don’t think I’ll be able to trust you fully for a long time. But this is a start.”  
Kylo took Hux’s hand in his own. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of trivia about the fic: Bill Slee is a shortening of Clan Techie's name in the Dredd comics, Bill Huxley, and Arogan is an anagram of Organa.  
> Forgive me if the end feels a bit rushed. I just wanted to finish this fic before it killed me!  
> I'm considering a sequel where they navigate their trust issues and how they really feel about each other, so let me know your thoughts! If I've missed anything that needs to be tagged, please tell me.


End file.
